The first bus rapid transit in Brazil (BRT) was built in 1974 in the city of Curitiba by the then mayor, architect Jaime Lerner, and became the second BRT in the world. The goal of the system is to provide high quality rail transit service to customers and at a comparable cost to that of a bus transit. Curitiba's success inspired the implementation of similar plans in more than 100 cities around the world, including the Brazilian cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Manaus, Goiânia, Aracaju, Salvador, Recife, and Brasília.